Comfortable sadness...

Does sadness make us more in tune with reality? I think both emotions can lend themselves quite nicely to exaggerating certain elements of a situation.

 

Ignorance REALLY helps me enjoy life. I was very happy when I would drink and avoid thinking. However, it makes things harder to deal with outside of your ignorance. Eventually it spirals into depression just because it is not sustainable.

Then again, I am a bit biased about life right now probably due to stress.

 

i think we sometimes do, happiness never lasts does it, on some level perhaps we seek out the genuine security of sadness. are we afraid of being truly happy? maybe, how many times in your life can you think of that you've been extremely happy? probably very few. contentment is common, sadness not infrequent, but happiness, real happiness, the kind that you can't wait to get up everyday and embrace life with, that kind of feeling is rare - probably thats what makes it precious, but maybe also for the same reason we reject it -its out of the range of our normal experience

 

In life, sometimes I have been attracted to sad things. However, I don't think that I subconsciously look to undermine myself, okay maybe I do, I don't know! To me, things that are inconvenient or tragic offer a new perspective on life. Things that are difficult: suffering, oppression, despair are all things most of us have tasted potently in our life. I personally cannot help but be a little curious to see how others deal with such things. These challenge the scope of how we live, they urge one to take a look at the larger picture of life and ot re-analyze what priorities truly have weight.

As for expecting sadness, or setting yourself up to experience it, that might mean you still feel that you deserve something negative due to some past inference, typically a subconscious repetitively learned trait that you are worthless as prescribed by influencial others in your life.

 

For me this is very true. Part of my life (and life in general if you watch the news) is very sad. Part is happy, too. For me it is both....I can access one or the other, or generally both at the same time. One keeps me sober and awake, the other keeps me forward looking, positive, and open. I will say this, having both at work makes it instantly possible to show empathy for others as both sadness and joy are virtually ever-present. I might even say being able to hold both lends a certain wisdom.

 

The flip side of that argument is that happiness, a positive outlook, allows one to look at the things that are still intact and therefore, focus on the opportunities still available to resolve the problem in the first place. I think a positive outlook might lend itself better to moving forward, rather than remaining stagnate.

Perhaps the "comfort" of sadness is simply an opportunity to stay with the familiar rather than gamble with the whole spectrum of emotions should you move forward in your situation. A classical symptom of anxiety and subconscious avoidance behavior. Having experienced a thick slice of this particular feeling before, it is my opinion that it plays perfectly into the INFJ's need for stability and certainty (protection!)... at a very unhealthy cost.

 

very much true!

yes and the oposite is also true. Some people stay with the happy feelings to not to have to feel sadness. So they keep themselves busy with creating happy feelings all the time.

I think what randomsomeone said is very valuable. To keep the two sides of the emotional spectrum ad hand so you can switch easily from one to the other and experience all emotions almost at the same time as a whole!

With me it is easier to switch to the sad side than to the happy side. Whenever I'm happy there will always be some detail in the matter that makes me sad again. It is like I can only remember the sad parts of an event and not the good ones. I can give you a 1000 sad moments in my live and only a handfull good ones while my live hasn't been that bad at all. i always feel like I shouldn't be happy, I can't be happy. It feels like it is a trap to be happy because sooner or later someone would come and do something or say something negative about me and that will pick my balloon. I wonder why I feel that way ...

 

I'm on the same path myself, breaking through the sadness! Thanks for this tread. I knew I was cleaning up my mess but this tread makes it more clear to me why I still have those moments of sadness, a lulling comfort indeed!

Whenever I feel sadness or exhaustment now, it means I'm pushing away a thought/memory/habbit that is pulling me down. I should use it as a barometer and heal that part of me. But it is hard to do when you feel sad/lonely/inferior

 

Very interesting point and I share your view, although I describe it to myself differently. Personally, when I think happiness, I don't think of someone permanently blissed out or tweaking on their own dopamine. I think of someone who is at ease with themselves and who doesn't put expectations on their feelings; he or she merely experiences them.

As someone who has crawled out of the pit of depression, I have to say, the one thing that I noticed about myself in this state of mind was that it didn't mean that I was immune to other feelings besides enduring sadness. I did experience moments of joy, moments of fear, moments of bravery... basically, everything that a non-depressed person experiences. But these emotions had a stunted, mechanical quality to them. Like trying to start up a car in the winter time and having it stall a couple of times before you got the engine running.

The core of that feeling was that I would over-think my emotions. I would put a label on them and automatically compare them to what a 'normal' person would experience in this situation. I'm not sure if I'm explaining myself correctly here, but the only way I can describe it is that everything I did, even things that were positive, was tinted by this shade of negativity and rigid expectations. Once I began to sort of step back from these judgments and just let these emotions come to me, I felt lighter... and happier overall, even though I might have been mad or sad or fearful at the time. I think this is the core difference between owning your emotions and being your emotions.

 

Well don't go back B, go forward. You can do it. We all want to see more of that dynamic, wonderful person inside of you. This is a very interesting thread, and one everyone has thoughts on I'm sure. I don't think being a melancholy or sad person has as much to do with environment as we may often think. I had a near ideal upbringing and I still experience many times of near depression and intense sadness.

Perhaps some of this ties into being very empathic. Not to downplay peoples difficult lives and upbringing, but we are all predisposed to feel sadness in a certain way I think. In many ways it's human nature to want to experience it--at least that's how I feel about it. Look on any poetry site and the "Sadness" category is always one of the top two.

I've also noticed (as Enty has commented before) that my creative juices really flow when I'm sad. I don't know that this says I prefer this state; I thinks it's saying I want to better understand this state and thus relieve it. But I am definitely in a much more analytical mode when sad, much more questioning, than when I am happy. During the periods of happiness, I just want to be (to experience it). Also, during happiness I record and store emotion, during sadness I analyse it. I really want to understand it. I think when angry I experience emotion at it most raw form, this is the state it can really get away if you let it. But we all need some sadness I think to help balance things out. But we can't live in it; we can, and must, learn from it.

 

The only problem with this otherwise potent and beautifully written analogy is that you're still painting sadness and happiness as outside influences vying over control over your person. It isn't so much sadness that must be escaped--indeed, it would be foolish to promise that you would never experience it again-- but rather, its the part of yourself that favours sadness that must be confronted and acknowledged. It's important to realize that this internal battle is not separate entities, but rather, made up of the individual whole. You are that darkness as much as you are the light. And you can't really run from or toward yourself, can you? It's when you accept that you are really outside of this battle, as much as you are inside of it, do you gain the freedom that you desire.

I do not mean anything mean spirited by putting this way, of course; I'm only offering up this viewpoint as it might help to get that push out the door

 

Yes to the first question. And I agree with the second statement as well.

Good points.

Yep. Agree.

 

Please elaborate as to why you think that is.